Market Research and Customer Discovery Resources for Your Startup Part 2

Founded in 2007 by Mike Arrington, Crunchbase was spun out of TechCrunch and started as a crowdsourced database to track startups. Today it is the world’s most comprehensive platform of startup activity where you’ll find over 3,400 global investment firms that update their monthly portfolio. Crunchbase is the go-to platform for discovering industry trends, investments, and news from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

While the basic free service lets you access nearly a million profiles of companies and people, the subscription-based Crunchbase Pro features advanced search, custom lists and alerts, trend scores, analysis tools, and exporting functionality. As a “stats-based Wikipedia for startups”, Crunchbase is a valuable analysis tool that you can use to keep tabs on the world’s startup activity, funding, and investment.

What if you can avoid making bad business decisions because you have contextual data as reference? By being able to compare yourself with similar companies, you can cut down on your business failure rate. Compass, also known as Startup Compass, is a benchmarking tool that allows you to view your key metrics in the context of peer companies, without having to rely on a team of analysts.

Using a data-driven feedback loop, Compass enables you to benchmark your KPIs against other startups, diagnose problems, allocate resources, and measure progress. With its all-in-one dashboard designed for e-commerce, you can also analyze and track your acquisition channels, automate management reports, and prepare benchmarks for your business meetings.

Based on Google Search, Google Trends is a public web tool that gives insights on search-terms. It can show you how often a search-term is entered relative to the total search volume across regions worldwide. It also lets you to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms, get trending search terms, and subscribe to them.

Google Trends is a data goldmine for market research as, in addition to search-terms, you have multiple filtering options such as regions, time frame, categories, and engines, with results broken out into graphs showing historic trends (interest over time) and localized (regional) trends. For market research, you can get data on your brand reach and influence by region, categorize priority topics, identify shopping trends, and more.

Leveraging Google data as well as studies done with its global partners, Google’s Consumer Barometer is a free tool that shows how people around the world use the internet. Covering more than 45 countries and 10 product categories, the tool offers an array of tools that give you insights on shopping and purchase behaviors of your target audience.

Using the tools under Consumer Barometer, you can create your own custom analysis of how people use the internet, see how internet access and device usage across the world, learn the internet’s role in the lives of key audience segments, and discover curated insights from Google.

Founded in Israel, the startup behind SimilarWeb started out with SimilarSites in 2009 and quickly grew into the digital market intelligence industry. A website traffic research tool, SimilarWeb helps you discover traffic insights for any website. You can benchmark against your competitors and industry, understand consumer intent and interests, know your competition’s web analytics, discover new partners, leads, and affiliates, and identify emerging trends.

Used by agencies, marketers, analysts, and business devs, SimilarWeb also works with the biggest brands including eBay, HSBC, AirBnB, and P&G. Crunchbase recently partnered with SimilarWeb to be its provider of web analytics data.

If you want to get your hands on industry statistics, Statista has your back. It integrates over 60,000 topics of data and facts from over 18,000 sources into one platform. Covering both consumer markets and digital markets, Statista provides researchers and business customers immediate access to reliable data in their areas of interest.

Aside from being the leading statistics portal, Statista also provides services such as customized research and analysis, content and information design, and net sales data for over 6,000 online stores worldwide via its ecommerceDB.com service. While content is generally free to access, having a Premium account lets you access exclusive data and other features of the platform.